leather, fabric, yarn

Harder than it looks, yes

I’m trying to paint posters, one of a zillion things getting ready for the Guy Weadick Days market in nine days. I do leather, not paint, and, seeing the pic, I’ve gotta say my leather creations are of very much higher quality than my free-hand sign lettering.

Traditional Western colours are brown and turquoise, so with acrylic paints I started by mixing a turquoise that turned out not too badly. I painted ‘What would you like made for you?’ on a couple of the big white cards I bought today (22″ x 28″). I left space to paint LEATHER across the top.

Then, unbelievably, it took forever to mix the paints to make the leftover turquoise into brown. Who in the world cannot make brown? Everything makes brown.

It was like the time I made potato soup for a choir fund-raiser. By the end of the first evening, I had a big pot of potato starch glue. It took me two days to thin it gradually into soup, by which time I had a LOT OF SOUP.

So, to my turquoise I added this and that and got the colour that just this week was voted the ugliest in the world. Highly suitable for cigarette packs to discourage smokers, but just not nice for making leather appealing. http://gizmodo.com/is-this-color-ugly-enough-to-make-you-quit-smoking-1781841141

So, searching for a sweet brown to represent leather, I kept on and on, added white and pink and red and yellow and more red and finally got there and picked up my paint brush again.

By the fifth time painting LEATHER, I’m thinking I’m developing an attractive font, getting the letters decently spaced and even in size, patting myself on the back because I thought of painting all the verticals of the letters first, then filling in the round and horizontal parts.

That worked well, yes it did, until I oops – distracted by thinking I’m quite the dab hand at this, bit full of myself – joined the vertical of the T to the first vertical of the H, leaving the second vertical of the H sad and lonely and embarrassed to be sitting all alone beside the E.

I’ve now painted over my mistake with white paint. Of *course* it’s a different white than the card stock. But if I start trying to mix the right white, the market will have come and gone and I’ll be curled up sobbing in the corner of my workshop….

So here’s a glorious Oriental poppy swarming with 11 honeybees, just because I’ve never seen such a sight before. Bees are apparently as thrilled by beauty as I am.